A lot of people say that "more houses need to be build" to fix it. The problem is less "not having apartments" but "not having affordable apartments". A a lot

A lot of people say that "more houses need to be build" to fix it. The problem is less "not having apartments" but "not having affordable apartments". A a lot of "housing" had been build in the recent years but hardly any of it increased the "supply of affordable housing". Most had been very expensive "luxurious"(1) living spaces, from small one family houses to large "luxus" apartments. At the same time a lot of affordable living space has been converted into non affordable ones or removed from the rental marked. Reasons for this are many fold and include: - Prices in Berlin had been unrealistic low, so once they started rising/people realized it they rose fast attracting a lot of speculative investments, speeding up the price rise and level above what it should have been. - Stupid formulated laws around "energy" renovations turned out to be a perfect backdoor to circumvent existing limitations about how much rent can rise, especially if combined with little continues wide spread Illegal acting allowed massively bumping prices in short time. - Certain tax changes done ~7 or so years ago increased renovation cost massively, and the price boom and building (of non affordable housing) boom made it hard to build/renovate affordable housing for people just owning a small number of apartments). - Also maybe thinks like Aribnb had a bad effect, but I can't judge this. So what should be changed IMHO: 1. Change the energy renovation law to not be trivially abusable. 2. Make regulations which favor affordable rentable living space over all other versions (also favor it over office space). 3. Change certain laws about tax handling of losses from "rent", i.e. there are people which but absurd prices on apartments with the intent of them to not ever be rented because they bought them for speculative investments and selling a unrelated one is easier/better. If a apartment is in a area with a deficit of (affordable) living space you should not be able to tax-deduct losses because you werent able to rent out an apartment. (Similar the kind of "buy to sell at a higher price later" behaviour should be illegal.). 4. Add a legal method the state can use to punish organizations which en-mass do a lot of systematic small illegal things which each on themself are not worth opening up a law suite and affect a different person, like systematically trying to increase rents slightly more then average every time. 5. Maybe (idk, only if it matter) auto-sync databases of platforms like Airbnb with residential databases to auto detect abuse. 6. Undo mistakes of the past where Berlin reduced affordable housing programs. (1): Price wise, not necessarily quality wise.